The 2024 San Francisco Giants have had seven hitters with an OPS at least 10 percent better than the league average and at least 300 plate appearances. That’s seven hitters with substantial playing time, all of whom have been better than the average National League hitter.
There have been 57 MLB teams in the modern era (since 1901) who have had as many hitters like that in a season. The breakdown of those teams is remarkable:
• Four of the teams finished under .500
• 12 of the teams won between 84 and 89 games
• 14 of the teams won between 90 and 99 games, but not the pennant
• Seven of the teams won at least 100 games, but not the pennant
• One of the teams was the 1994 Yankees, who finished with a 70-43 record (a 100-win pace) in a strike-shortened season
• 11 of the teams won the pennant, but not the World Series
• Eight of the teams won the World Series
Almost half the full-season teams either won 100 games, the pennant, the World Series or all of the above. All but 7 percent of them finished over .500. The 2024 Giants have a chance to be one of those under-.500 teams. And if they’re not, they’ll be the weirdos in a class of their own. They’ll finish between 81 and 83 wins. They’ll be in the Phantom Zone. They’ll be a team unlike any other.
That’s who the 2024 Giants are keeping company with, which makes for a happy, fun story. Except for the part where the Giants missed the postseason, in part because they didn’t score enough runs. (And also because they didn’t prevent enough runs, but you can read about that here.)
This is a lot of selective endpoints to process, so I’ll condense it: Teams with as many above-average hitters as the Giants tend to win more games than they lose. A lot of them win 100 games, the pennant or the World Series. The 2024 Giants will not do any of those things.
The difference isn’t that complicated.
Of the 56 full-season teams, only four didn’t also have a batter who was at least 30 percent higher than the league average (an OPS+ of 130 or better). They had a bunch of solid hitters, but they didn’t have any great ones. Those teams:
• The 1943 Senators, who finished 84-69
• The 1988 Angels, who finished 75-87
• The 2006 Blue Jays, who finished 87-75
• The 2016 Marlins, who finished 79-82
The teams without a star hitter didn’t do squat. All of the above was written before Andrew Baggarly’s exploration of the offense, which came to a similar conclusion.
The Dodgers are easy enough to explain. Turns out signing Shohei Ohtani, then sitting back and watching him post the first 50-homer, 50-steal season in major-league history is a good blueprint for success. Whether it’s Ohtani or Aaron Judge/Juan Soto in the Bronx or José Ramírez in Cleveland or Bobby Witt Jr. in Kansas City or Gunnar Henderson in Baltimore or Yordan Alvarez in Houston or Bryce Harper in Philadelphia, there’s a very short list of difference-making star players in the league right now and it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that all of them will be playing baseball in October.
It seems both obvious and counterintuitive at the same time. Of course the teams with star hitters will score more runs. At the same time, can one player be the difference between middling and successful?
Yeah. Seems like it. It’s not a guarantee of success — the 1984 Giants had four batters with more than 300 PA and an OPS+ over 130, and they were awful — but a lineup with a lot of solid-to-decent hitters needs an anchor. And if you’re looking for an infographic to explain why, boy, do I have the infographic for you.
This is a rough and dirty visualization of when each Giant with more than 250 plate appearances was hot or cold, with “hot” defined as an OPS over .800 during the stretch, and “cold” defined as an OPS under .700. (“Injured” is when the player was injured.) You can find a link to the timeline here, if that’s easier to read for you.
The best way to read this timeline is vertical. As in, read it from top to bottom and see how many of the red rectangles overlap. There aren’t a ton. When one hitter got hot, others got cold. It made for a lineup that was far too easy to pitch to. The presence of a star-level hitter, someone so productive that his cold stretches are merely blips, is how those gaps are bridged. (And if you can’t do that, pitch like the 2010 Giants.)
A minor twist to the story is that the Giants actually do have a hitter with an elite OPS+. That would be Tyler Fitzgerald, who ranks 20th in baseball among batters with 300 plate appearances or more. That’s incredible, but you can see just how brief those contributions were on the timeline up there. For a stretch, he was as hot as any Giants player in history, but it wasn’t nearly enough to carry an entire season.
So that’s the prescription. Get a hitter or four who can knock the absolute snot out of the ball. Do it posthaste. Go to GetStarHitters.com and enter code PRETTYPLEASE for 20 percent off your first order.
Except it might not be that easy. I truly believe the Giants made good-faith efforts for Harper, Judge and Ohtani (and dodged a bullet with Giancarlo Stanton). They didn’t go after Mookie Betts, which was possibly their biggest mistake, especially if the Red Sox would have been tempted by Joey Bart and/or Marco Luciano back then. But it’s just not easy to secure one of these players, even if you really, really want one and ask nicely.
There are other ways, though. Heliot Ramos reaching another level wouldn’t be impossible. Fitzgerald fixing the hole in his swing over the last couple of months would be the difference between “star” and “hits well for a shortstop.” There are other players you might not be thinking about. The Tigers are likely to make the postseason with the help of Kerry Carpenter, a 19th-round pick who never made a top-100 prospect list. Sometimes, a player emerges.
It would also appear that Juan Soto is a free agent this offseason. The Giants should sign him, in my opinion.
One thing you should not do is put too much pressure on Bryce Eldridge, who just turned 20. Even though he had a remarkable minor-league season and is the Giants’ best hitting prospect since Buster Posey, if not Will Clark, it’s simply not fair to put the burden on his shoulders. While it might be true that I was winking at my computer the entire time I was writing that, it’s still very unfair to expect that of a recent teenager.
This is the next hurdle. The Giants have accumulated more solid hitters than you might give them credit for. It’s a stick of dynamite without a fuse or a match, though, and it’ll go to waste until they sign, develop or trade for A Guy. He doesn’t have to be a latter-day Barry Bonds, although that would certainly help. He just needs to be Brandon Belt, Brandon Crawford or Darin Ruf in 2021. And then he should do it again for several years after that.
The Giants’ lineup is a Coldplay album. Completely inoffensive. Sometimes pleasant. Never transcendent. They need at least one plus-plus hitter next year if they want to be “OK Computer” or “Kid A.” You’ll even settle for “The King of Limbs.” I know I would. That album’s second half is extremely competitive.
If you’re not a music/Radiohead person, just know that the Giants are so close, yet so far. The fix is easy to spot. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to make.
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